Upcoming Cause Mapping Public Workshops

September 15-16, 2010
Dallas, TX

Capture Cause Maps

Cause Maps provide a visual history of a specific incident and can be captured several different ways. Three of the most common ways to document a Cause Map are with pencil and paper, Post-It notes on a wall using white paper or electronically by using tools such as Microsoft? Excel. ? Using pencil and paper to map the cause and effect relationships is the easiest and most readily available method. Using a piece of paper to sketch four of five causes provides a visual dialogue for those looking at the issue. For group facilitations using Post-It notes on a dry erase board or on white paper can be extremely effective. The Post-It notes allow individuals to add their causes to the map without even saying a word. Participants in the investigation should each have a pad of Post-It? notes. Being able to keep Cause Maps for future reference is extremely useful. This can be done with the pen and paper or with Post-It? note methods especially if they placed on a piece of white paper that can be taken down and put back up in a conference room at a later date. Placing the Post-It? notes on the white paper provides some portability to the map. If corrective actions were selected for a given issue and the issue occurred again six months later then obviously some causes changed for they were missed the first time. We wouldn’t want to start from scratch on a new Cause Map. We’d like to start with the Cause Map that we originally created and add the new information. Electronically it becomes very easy to capture the progression of a Cause Map as the group learns more. Excel? provides the capability of not only easily documenting a Cause Map, but for capturing multiple worksheets within one workbook. Below is an example of a Cause Map for the Titanic created in Microsoft Excel (see Figure 3.). There are 19 causes on this Cause Map. A more thorough analysis of this incident has over 130 causes on the map. All of the corrective actions learned from the actual Titanic incident can be matched to specific causes from map.